in recent years.

From the bundling politics of Angela Merkel

to the famed beer festival in Munich,

known as the Oktoberfest,

Germany has repeatedly been in the spotlight,

and, far and away, the country most requested

by our Top Lists fans has been the Bundesrepublik.

So now, by popular demand, we bring you the top 10 things

you didn't know about Germany.

Germany is the largest economy in Europe.

It has the fourth largest nominal GDP in the world.

It might seem exaggerated to say, but everything

that has to do with the European Union and Euro

is highly dependent on Germany.

In fact, without Germany's economic participation

and continued support

the Eurozone would be a thing of the past.

Germany's support has allowed

for the continual participation

of substantially weaker economies,

such as Spain, Italy, and Greece,

and has kept their economies afloat

in the midst of horrible debt and economic mismanagement.

So theoretically, if Germany cut the purse strings,

it could send all of southern Europe into a downward spiral,

but that's probably not going to happen.

And here is why.

Germany is a country haunted by its past

and the possibility of being portrayed in a negative light

is something that Germans just can't afford.

You see, if Germany left the EU and cut off southern Europe,

you can only imagine the names it would be called,

and that's putting it mildly.

Because of this, Germany will be stuck

between a rock and a hard place for a long time to come.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been all beer and glory

as Germany has a pretty checkered past.

If you've never been to Germany before,

you probably have never heard of the stolperstein,

or literally a stumbling stone.

Conceived in the eary 1990s, by the German artist

Gunter Demnig, the stolperstein is a tile,

usually made of bronze, commemorating the victims

of the National Socialist regime in Germany.

Their names and place of residence are etched into the tile,

as is the approximate date of death

and sometimes time of deportation

to the concentration camps of the Nazis.

By now, stolpersteine have spread across Europe

to countries outside of Germany,

marking the popularity of the idea behind them.

According to the Cambridge historian Joseph Pearson,

it is not the information on the tiles

that gives passer-bys pause, but the lack thereof.

"It is not what is written on them which intrigues,

"because the inscription is insufficient

"to conjure a person.

It is the emptiness, void, lack of information,

"the maw of the forgotten,

"which gives the monuments their power

"lifts them from the banality of a statistic."

As a part of Germany's unfortunate past there're some things

you literally just cannot say in Germany.

That is, if you don't want to go to jail,

called Volksverhetzung in German, or incitement to hatred,

saying certain things about certain groups of people,

or denying the Holocaust

and the legacy of National Socialism

can actually land you in jail.

Some of the statute reads as follows:

"Whosoever publicly or in a meeting approves of,

"denies or downplays an act committed

"under the rule of National Socialism

"in manner capable of disturbing the public peace

"shall be liable to imprisonment

"not exceeding five years or a fine."

Such legal measures have been debated back and forth

on their merits by freedom of speech scholars

for several decades now.

But the German government seems intent

on upholding the measures for the foreseeable future.

From dark pumpernickel to light rye

to everything inbetween in over 300 types of bread,

Germany has more bread variety

than any other country in the world.

Bread forms a major part of just about every German meal

and with over 300 types it's not hard to see why.

In fact, one German word for dinner, Abendbrot,

literally means evening bread and indicates the importance

of one's daily bread in Germany.

Another popular sort of bread,

rarely seen outside of Germany,

is the Broetchen, which literally means little bread.

Which, in fact, is lesser type of bread,

there is a particular size and shape of bread.

Broetchen are typically small and can be held in one hand,

as opposed to full loaves of bread,

and are possibly the most popular type of food in Germany.

While most people think of beer when they think of Germany,

they're really missing out on all that bread.

Unlike the United States where piss water,

otherwise known as Coors Light and Budweiser,

counts as beer, Germany is rightly regarded

as the fatherland of beer.

Going as far back as Roman times,

when Germanic tribes were cited by Roman historians

for their beer brewing skills,

the tradition has continued throughout the Middle Ages

to the present, giving us a tremendous variety

of trully unique beer.

As a testament to German dedication

to a pure and tasteful beer, in the Middle Ages

there was legislation introduced called the Reinheitsgebot,

or purity decree,

proclaiming that only the purest of ingredients,

namely water, barley and hops, could go into beer.

Today, there're dozens and dozens of beers in Germany,

many of them regional, such as the Cologne-based Koelsch,

which is actually illegal

to brew outside of the Cologne region.

But rest assured, every type of German beer bears the stamp

of umparalleled German quality.

Germany was the birthplace of one of the greatest

and most long-standing religious and political conflicts

in the world.

Martin Luther, theologian and religious radical,

infamously posted his 95 Theses

on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences

on the door of a church in Wittenberg,

as a critique of the Catholic Church's corruption,

and shortly thereafter Europe exploded in conflict.

This action on the part of Martin Luther

is widely regarded as the beginning of the splintering

and fracturing of Christianity in Europe

as protestantism was born.

This led to centuries of political and religious conflict

accompanied by mass bloodshed and loss of human life

in such conflicts as the Thirty Years' War,

which is widely regarded as one

of the most destructive conflicts in European history,

and the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France

where Catholics engaged in mass murder

of thousands of French protestant calvinists,

known as Huguenots.

Without the German theologian Martin Luther

modern Europe as we know it today

and indeed Christianity would be very, very different.

You may not know it,

but Germany is a comparatively young country.

Prior to the 19th century and throughout the Middle Ages

much of what was modern Germany

had simply been known as the Holy Roman Empire.

But in the 19th century, under the visionary authority

of the Prussian statesmen Otto von Bismarck,

the modern concept of the nation-state of Germany was born.

Germany is often referred to as the Bundesrepublik,

and this is because modern Germany is composed

of 16 federal states, which all differ from each other

often in subtle ways.

They are: Buden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Hesse,

Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, Thuringia,

North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Hamburg,

Bremen, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Brandenburg,

Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,

and finally, Schleswig-Holstein.

The modern German consolation of 16 federated states

is relatively new in German history.

But each one retains a fiercely independent character

dating back to before the time of German unification.

For example, the state of Bavaria refers to itself

as Freistaat Bayern, which means the free state of Bavaria.

The Bundeslander, as they are called in German,

all have different customs, histories, foods,

and even cultures, often going back many centuries,

giving them each a unique flavour

despite falling under the banner of greater Germany.

Just as modern Germany evolved from many separate states

that were fused together

under the iron fist of Otto von Bismarck,

so too is modern standard German,

called Hochdeutsch in German,

an album of many different elements fused into one.

The dialects of Germany are even older

than the regions they seem to come from,

harking back to the earliest Germanic tribes,

mentioned by the Romans.

From that period onwards the Germanic tribesmen

settled in many different places

and their languages evolved on their own.

Fast forward to the present and you have a country

with literally hundreds of different dialects,

some of which are so different from each other

so as to be considered different languages.

For example, the High German word for squirrel

is Eichhoernchenschwanz, but in Bavarian

it's Orchkatezlschworf.

Even if you don't know German,

you can certainly hear the difference.

A Bavarian speaking his native dialect

to a person from Hamburg will not be understood at all.

So to communicate across the many states

and indeed countries, such as Switzerland and Austria,

German speak High German, a standardized German

with a fixed grammar and set of rules,

albeit each with their own regional accents.

For some four decades Germany was a divided land.

There was West Germany and East Germany,

also known as the DDR,

or Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

A legacy of the Cold War that ensued after World War II,

it all ended when East Germany was united as one country

with the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall

on November, 9th, 1989.

There were great hopes at the time with many people

long separated from each other reconnected,

but many of these hopes have been dashed

in the ensuing decades.

Close to three decades after the fall of the wall,

eastern Germany still lags behind its western counterpart

economically by as much as one third.

Greater unemployment and fewer life opportunities

have also given rise to a comparatively disproportionate

number of so-called anti-establishment groups,

such as neo-Nazis, fascists, and the far-right,

compared to western Germany.

It's sad to admit, but it just might be the case

that eastern Germany may never catch up

with western Germany, something that,

given Germany's troubled history,

might bring with it potentially dire

political and social consequences

not just for Germany, but for the world at large.

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